THE BOOK OF NEVER

music of Aaron Helgeson
in New York City

Friday, June 20 @ 7pm

St Peter’s Church
619 Lexington Ave, New York City

The final event of the 2024-2025 season will be the New York premiere of Aaron Helgeson’s The Book of Never, a fascinating adaptation of the mysterious Novgorod Codex. The work reaches back 1000 years into Ukraine’s history, with the sadly contemporary story of an attempt to destroy and erase a culture.

The Codex was an 10th-century monk’s effort to preserve the history of his excommunicated village by writing and overwriting many layers, a technique that Aaron masters musically as he overlays these ancient texts with those of 20th-century liberal writers Oscar Wilde, Pablo Neruda, Gertrude Stein, Angela Davis, and Thanhha Lai.